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Economy
Expert Warns Small Interest Rate Cut 'Will Do Little to Address Trump's Economic Turmoil'
"Trump promised to lower prices on day one and be 'the champion of the American worker,' yet his economic agenda has delivered higher prices, a stalled job market, and sluggish growth," said another economist.
Sep 17, 2025
As working-class Americans contend with a stalled labor market and rising prices under US President Donald Trump, economist Alex Jacquez warned Wednesday that the Federal Reserve's "small rate cut will do little to address Trump's economic turmoil."
"Driven by a stagnant job market, the Fed's move offers no real relief to American households, consumers, or workers—all of whom are paying the price for Trump's economic mismanagement," said Jacquez, who previously served as a special assistant to former President Barack Obama and is now chief of policy and advocacy at the think tank Groundwork Collaborative. "No interest rate tweak can undo that damage."
Jacquez's colleague Liz Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at Groundwork, similarly said Wednesday that "President Trump promised to lower prices on day one and be 'the champion of the American worker,' yet his economic agenda has delivered higher prices, a stalled job market, and sluggish growth. He's leaving families and workers high and dry—and no move by the Fed will save them."
The president has been pressuring the US central bank to slash its benchmark interest rate, taking aim at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump appointed during his first term. Powell remained in the post under former Democratic President Joe Biden.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) voted to lower the federal funds rate by 0.25 percentage points, from 4.25-4.5% to 4-4.25%. It is the first cut since December 2024, and Powell said the decision reflects a "shift in the balance of risks" to the Fed's dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment.
Daniel Hornung, who held economic policy roles during the Obama and Biden administrations and is now a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, said in a statement that "beyond the Fed's September cut, the main story from the Fed's projections is a cloudy outlook for the economy and monetary policy over the rest of the year."
The cut came after Trump ally Stephen Miran was sworn in to a seat on the Fed's Board of Governors on Tuesday—which made this FOMC gathering "the most politically charged meeting in recent memory," as Politico reported.
The new appointee "was the only Fed official to dissent from the decision," the outlet noted. "Miran called for twice as large a cut in borrowing costs, and the Fed's economic projections suggest that one official—likely Miran—would support jumbo-sized rate cuts at the next two meetings as well—an estimate that is conspicuously lower than the other 18 estimates."
Hornung highlighted that "an equal number of members favor hiking, no further cuts, or one cut to the number of members who favor two more cuts, and one outlier member—presumably, President Trump's current Council of Economic Advisers chair—favors the equivalent of five cuts."
"Besides Miran’s outlier status, which sends concerning signals about continued Fed independence," he added, "the wide range of views on the committee is a reaction to the real risks that tariff and immigration policy pose to both sides of the Fed's mandate."
Federal immigration agents across the United States are working to deliver on Trump's promised mass deportations, despite warnings of the human and economic impacts of rounding up immigrants living and working in the country. The president is also engaged in a global trade war, imposing tariffs that have driven up prices for a range of goods.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced last week that overall inflation rose by 2.9% year-over-year in August and core inflation rose by 3.1%. Jacquez said at the time: "Make no mistake, inflation is accelerating and American families continue to feel price pressures across the board from children's clothing, to groceries, to autos. Rate cuts will not ease the inescapable financial pain that the Trump economy is inflicting on households across the nation."
That came less than a week after BLS revealed in its first jobs report since Trump fired the agency's commissioner that the US economy added only 22,000 jobs in August, and the number of jobs created in July and June were once again revised downward.
Jacquez had called that report "more evidence that Trump’s promises to working families have fallen flat."
Recent polling has also exposed how working people are suffering under Trump's second administration. One survey—conducted by Data for Progress for Groundwork and Protect Borrowers—shows that "American families are trapped in a cycle of debt," with 55% of likely voters reporting at least some credit card debt, and another 18% saying they “had this type of debt in the past, but not anymore.”
The poll, released last week, also found that over half have or previously had car loan or medical debt, more than 40% have or had student debt, and over 35% are or used to be behind on utility payments. Additionally, nearly 30% have or had “buy now, pay later” debt through options such as Afterpay or Klarna.
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'I've Never Seen Anything Like It': Trump Policies Leave US Farmers in Dire Straits
"It's a five-alarm fire," one Kentucky soybean farmer said, describing the harmful effects of the president's tariffs.
Sep 16, 2025
As anticipated, US President Donald Trump's economic and immigration policies are harming American farmers' ability to earn a living—and testing the loyalty of one of the president's staunchest bases of support, according to reports published this week.
After Trump slapped 30% tariffs on Chinese imports in May, Beijing retaliated with measures including stopping all purchases of US soybeans. Before the trade war, a quarter of the soybeans—the nation's number one export crop—produced in the United States were exported to China. Trump's tariffs mean American soybean growers can't compete with countries like Brazil, the world's leading producer and exporter of the staple crop and itself the target of a 50% US tariff.
"We depend on the Chinese market. The reason we depend so much on this market is China consumes 61% of soybeans produced worldwide," Kentucky farmer Caleb Ragland, who is president of the American Soybean Association, told News Nation on Monday. "Right now, we have zero sold for this crop that’s starting to be harvested right now.”
Ragland continued:
It’s a five-alarm fire for our industry that 25% of our total sales is currently missing. And right now we are not competitive with Brazil due to the retaliatory tariffs that are in place. Our prices are about 20% higher, and that means that the Chinese are going elsewhere because they can find a better value.
And the American soybean farmers and their families are suffering. They are 500,000 of us that produce soybeans, and we desperately need markets, and we need opportunity and a leveled playing field.
“There’s an artificial barrier that is built with these tariffs that makes us not be competitive," Ragland added.
Tennessee Soybean Promotion Council executive director Stefan Maupin likened the tariffs to "death by a thousand cuts."
“We’re in a significant and desperate situation where... none of the crops that farmers grow right now return a profit,” Maupin told the Tennessee Lookout Monday. “They don’t even break even.”
Alan Meadows, a fifth-generation soybean farmer in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, said that “this has been a really tough year for us."
“It started off really good," Meadows said. "We were in the field in late March, which is early for us. But then the wheels came off, so to speak, pretty quick.”
It started with devastating flooding in April, followed by a drier-than-usual summer. Higher supply costs due to inflation and Trump's tariffs exacerbated the dire situation.
“So much of what has happened and what’s going on here is totally out of our control,” Meadows said. “We just want a free, fair, and open market where we can sell our goods... as competitively as anybody else around the world. And we do feel that we produce a superior product here in the United States, and we just need to have the markets.”
Farmers are desperate for help from the federal government. However, Congress has not passed a new Farm Bill—legislation authorizing funding for agriculture and food programs—since 2018, without which "we do not have a workable safety net program when things like this happen in our economy," according to Maupin.
Maupin added that farmers “have done everything right, they’ve managed their finances well, they have put in a good crop... but they cannot change the weather, they cannot change the economy, they cannot change the markets."
"The weather is in the control of a higher power," he added, "and the economy and the markets are in control of Washington, DC."
It's not just soybean farmers who are hurting. Tim Maxwell, a 65-year-old Iowa grain and hog farmer, told the BBC Sunday that "our yields, crops, and weather are pretty good—but our [interest from] markets right now is on a low."
Despite his troubles, Maxwell remains supportive of Trump, saying that he is "going to be patient," adding, "I believe in our president."
However, there is a limit to Maxwell's patience with Trump.
"We're giving him the chance to follow through with the tariffs, but there had better be results," he said. "I think we need to be seeing something in 18 months or less. We understand risk—and it had better pay off."
It's also not just Trump's economic policies that are putting farmers in a squeeze. The president's anti-immigrant crackdown has left many farmers without the labor they need to operate.
“The whole thing is screwed up,” John Painter, a Pennsylvania organic dairy farmer and three-time Trump voter, told Politico Monday. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”
As Politico noted:
The US agricultural workforce fell by 155,000—about 7%—between March and July, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That tracks with Pew Research Center data that shows total immigrant labor fell by 750,000 from January through July. The labor shortage piles onto an ongoing economic crisis for farmers exacerbated by dwindling export markets that could leave them with crop surpluses.
“People don’t understand that if we don’t get more labor, our cows don’t get milked and our crops don’t get picked,” said Tim Wood, another Pennsylvania dairy farmer and a member of the state's Farm Bureau board of directors.
Charlie Porter, who heads the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau’s Ag Labor and Safety Committee, told Politico that “it’s a shame you have hard-working people who need labor, and a group of people who are willing to work, and they have to look over their shoulder like they’re criminals—they're not."
Painter also said that he is "very disappointed" by Trump's immigration policies.
“It’s not right, what they’re doing,” he said of the administration. “All of us, if we look back in history, including the president, we have somebody that came to this country for the American dream.”
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'Trump Is Making Your Life More Expensive': Tariff Chaos Engulfs US Economy
“Poor and working people are paying the price" of the president's tariff policies, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
Sep 16, 2025
US consumers are increasingly feeling the impact of President Donald Trump's tariffs, and the head of the Congressional Budget Office said on Monday that they are fueling inflation.
During an appearance on CNBC, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Phillip Swagel said that the president's tariffs have pushed up inflation more than the agency initially anticipated, although he emphasized that their impact on inflation so far was "not by a lot, but by enough to show" in the numbers.
Swagel also said that the higher-than-expected inflation was a surprise because there are signs that the US economy has slowed significantly since January.
CNN on Tuesday published an analysis using numbers from the Yale Budget Lab estimating that Trump's tariffs will cost US households an average of $2,300 extra per year, which is nearly three times as much as the $800 US households are projected to receive on average from new tax provisions contained in the Republicans' "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that passed earlier this year.
The combined distributional impacts of the Trump tariffs and the GOP tax law are also highly regressive. According to CNN's analysis, a household with annual earnings of $38,840 would be $2,560 worse off thanks to the tariffs and the tax law, while households earning $517,700 would be $8,180 better off.
The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that Trump's tariffs aren't just hurting Americans in the US, but those living abroad as well.
As explained by the Post, Americans living abroad have been unable to send mail to the US without paying hefty fines thanks to the chaos being caused by Trump's tariffs. The reason for this, writes the paper, is that Trump earlier this year canceled a policy known as the de minimis exemption, effective August 29, that "allowed the tariff-free flow of goods under $800 into the United States."
This has led not just to increased shipping costs for Americans living abroad, but has also resulted in foreign nations slowing or even outright halting shipments to the US because they are unsure about how to calculate the costs.
"Confusion about the rules have led to issues since the exemption was lifted on August 29," the Post wrote. "At first, national postal services in more than 30 countries temporarily suspended sending some or most US-bound packages. Since then, restrictions have eased, and the Universal Postal Union deployed a tool this week to help operators calculate duties and resume services."
Reacting to fresh revelations about the impact of the tariffs, many progressive Democrats hammered Trump for increasing the cost of living for working-class families.
"Under Donald Trump’s economy: coffee is up 26%, beef is up 14%, oranges are up 17%, bananas are up 6%, chicken is up 6%, chocolate chip cookies are up 5%, potato chips are up 4%, milk is up 4%," wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). "But average worker pay is only up 2%. Trumpflation is eating up your paycheck."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) added that “from school supplies to gas to groceries, Trump is making your life more expensive."
"Poor and working people are paying the price of his reckless policies," said the congresswoman.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, took to the Senate floor on Monday to single out a different Trump policy that he said was also raising prices for US consumers—namely, his attacks on green energy projects.
"This administration is shamelessly working to block one of our best defenses against rising energy bills: renewable energy," Padilla said. "And I say so because renewable energy is absolutely affordable, renewable energy is abundant, and whether you want to admit it or not, renewable energy sources are our future."
The senator also pointed to his home state of California as an example of what can happen when the government encourages the development of green energy projects.
"[California is] harnessing the power of solar and wind and hydroelectric power and nuclear, geothermal, even hydrogen power to our state," he said. "And it’s exactly because of those investments that even in a year like 2024, just last year, when we experienced record heatwaves that we also saw record renewable energy generation, and we kept the lights on."
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'Corporate Greed Is Out of Control': Tlaib-Sanders Bill Would Tax Companies for Excessive CEO Pay
"At a time of record-breaking income and wealth inequality, we must demand that the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in America finally pay their fair share of taxes," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Sep 16, 2025
With the world's richest person, Tesla CEO and Republican megadonor Elon Musk, on the cusp of becoming the first trillionaire on the planet, two leading progressive lawmakers are calling on Congress to pass a bill to "rein in the obscene salaries of America's top executives."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) on Monday introduced the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act with the aim of raising taxes on companies that pay their executives more than 50 times their workers' wages.
The legislation would impose penalties starting at 0.5 percentage points for companies with CEO-to-worker pay ratios between 50-to-1 and 100-to-1. Firms where executives make more than 500 times their workers' pay would be forced to pay the highest rate.
The bill would also require the US Treasury Department to crack down on tax avoidance, including schemes that disguise pay disparities by outsourcing jobs to contractors.
Sanders said that exorbitant CEO pay and massive pay gaps at corporations are intolerable "while 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and millions work longer hours for lower wages."
"It is unacceptable that the CEOs of the largest low-wage corporations make more than 630 times what their average workers make," said the senator, who has been criss-crossing the country this year with his Fighting Oligarchy Tour, galvanizing people in red and blue districts against wealth inequality, political corruption, and corporate power.
"This is not only morally obscene, but also insane economic policy," said Sanders. "At a time of record-breaking income and wealth inequality, we must demand that the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in America finally pay their fair share of taxes and treat all employees with the respect and dignity they deserve. That’s precisely what this legislation begins to do."
The proposal would raise an estimated $150 billion over a decade if tech giants, Wall Street firms, and other large corporations continue their current compensation patterns, and Sanders and Tlaib noted that the largest companies in the US would have paid billions of dollars more in taxes last year had the legislation been in effect.
JPMorgan Chase would have paid $2.38 billion in taxes, while Google would have paid $2.16 billion and Walmart would have paid $929 million.
With 62% of Republican voters and 75% of Democrats supporting a cap on CEO pay relative to worker salaries, the legislation would likely be well received by Americans across the political spectrum—but Republican lawmakers have shown little to no interest in confronting the pay gap, ensuring fair wages for workers, or reining in excessive executive compensation.
With the current CEO-employee pay gap, CEOs at the 350 largest publicly owned firms make 290 times more than the average pay of a typical worker at their companies, with the gap much larger at some corporations.
The median Walmart worker made $29,469 in 2024, while CEO Doug McMillon took home $27.4 million—a 930-to-1 gap.
The median Starbucks worker would have to work for more than 6,000 years to earn the pay CEO Brian Niccol took home in 2024.
"Working people are sick and tired of corporate greed," said Tlaib. “It’s disgraceful that corporations continue to rake in record profits by exploiting the labor of their workers. Every worker deserves a living wage and human dignity on the job."
"It’s time," she added, "to make the rich pay their fair share.”
Tlaib and Sanders introduced the legislation as Pope Leo spoke out against exorbitant CEO pay in his first interview since taking the helm of the Catholic Church, reserving particular condemnation for Musk, for whom the Tesla board proposed a $1 trillion pay package if he grows the company by eightfold over the next decade.
“CEOs that 60 years ago might have been making four to six times more than what the workers are receiving... it’s [now] 600 times more than the average workers are receiving,” the pope told the Catholic outlet Crux.
“Yesterday, the news that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world: What does that mean and what’s that about?" he added. "If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.”
Sanders said Monday that the pope "is exactly right."
"No society can survive when one man becomes a trillionaire while the vast majority struggle to just survive—trying to put food on the table, pay rent, and afford healthcare," said Sanders. "We can and must do better."
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